Less than a month before the 2016 election, the Committee to Protect Journalists, a nonprofit that promotes press freedom worldwide, released this extraordinary statement regarding then-candidate Donald Trump:

“A Trump presidency would represent a threat to press freedom in the United States, but the consequences for the rights of journalists around the world could be far more serious. Any failure of the United States to uphold its own standards emboldens dictators and despots to restrict the media in their own countries.”

Sadly, those words of warning turned out to be prescient and an accurate portrayal of the increased threat to press freedom in the first two years of the Trump presidency. Indeed, it is reasonable to conclude, as the committee and other international advocates of a free press have, that Trump’s verbal and legal assaults on the press have likely given cover to regimes that have imprisoned a record number of journalists globally (262 in 2017), and the Saudi regime’s brutal killing and dismemberment of The Washington Post’s Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey.

As journalists, we take no satisfaction in reporting that the words and actions of our president could contribute to the endangerment of journalists in nations without First Amendment protections, from Azerbaijan to China, Egypt to Eritrea and Ethiopia, Myanmar to Vietnam, to name just a few.

Yet we find it difficult to disagree with a statement by David Kaye and Edison Lanza, the special rapporteurs on freedom of expression for the United Nations and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, respectively, determining Trump’s assault on the press is “designed to undermine confidence in reporting and raise doubts about verifiable facts.”

Kaye and Lanza also determined Trump’s labeling of mainstream media outlets such as CNN or The New York Times as the “enemy of the American people” or “fake news” run “counter to the country’s obligations to respect press freedom and international human rights law.” While it’s unlikely Trump coined the phrase “fake news,” it’s true that autocrats and military regimes across the world have used it to justify cracking down on the press.

In March 2017, China’s state media disputed as “fake news” claims by a human-rights activist that police had tortured a fellow activist. In July 2017, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said his country was being “bullied” by the media and condemned as “fake news” reports on social unrest and protests against his government’s recent anti-democratic measures.

In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte regularly harasses news outlets for publishing “fake news” about his autocratic regime. Myanmar has gone even further, denouncing as “fake news” the existence of that country’s long-persecuted Muslim minority, the Rohingya.

Given these facts and Trump’s unwillingness to call out foreign leaders for their often-brutal crackdowns on the press, we reached out to Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists since 2006. This is not simply “an academic discussion,” he said. “It’s really about defending the people — the individuals — who inform us.”

We agree, and ask that our 45th president reflect on the words of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote in 1787 that “the basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”